Tuesday, August 25, 2020

An investigation in to the effect of oil and gas to Qatar's economy Essay

An examination in with the impact of oil and gas to Qatar's economy - Essay Example Aside from acquiring considerable incomes from sending out different items, each mechanical goliath inside these countries expend 25 barrels of oil for every individual yearly so as to keep up smooth usefulness in the activities and in this way add to the general financial advancement of the countries (The World Bank 103). As far as Qatar’s monetary condition and position, late reports venture that the country encounters a genuine development pace of about 5.5 % and is positioned 44th situation as far as world positioning. The per capita pay of this country was $102,100 as far as world positioning until the year 2013. Discernibly, the countries is positioned third as far as gross national investment funds, nineteenth regarding unrefined petroleum creation and sixth as far as gaseous petrol creation (Central Intelligence Agency, â€Å"The World Factbook† ). By taking into concern the discoveries of this specific examination, the invalid theory to be tried in this investigation will be, â€Å"The oil and gas industry has no significant effect on Qatar’s economy has been validated†. This case has been approved from the point of view of Qatar’s authorities who gave the explanation for the absence of effect on that country’s economy. In spite of the fact that oil contains 58% of Qatar’s economy just as 59% of that country’s sends out starting at 2012, the authorities kept up that the country’s development would ease back to 5% during the 2014 money related year. The economy would not understand significant effect in light of the fact that Qatar’s trades are relied upon to go down as the nation intends to contribute vigorously on its framework as it plans for 2022 World Cup competitions (Bakr and Dokoupil). The data aggregated from the exploration work unquestionably helps in deciding the legitimacy of the above-delineated invalid speculation. It tends to be insisted that the examination question is primarily organized with the expectation of understanding that how oil and gas segment being the essential segment in the Qatari economy force broad effect explicitly on the

Saturday, August 22, 2020

Notes on Cry Essay

The dance’s goal is to depict the battle and quality of the African American ladies who were in the slave exchange; how ladies so oppressed and caught can at present figure out how to be so free. â€Å"I caught wind of lynching’s, Having that sort of experience as a kid left a sentiment of fury in me that I think plagues my work† Alvin Ailey. â€Å"She rises again to wear the material as a shawl, at that point steps on its finishes as though limited by it to the ground†¦Ã¢â‚¬  â€Å"The last stance reflects the initial stance of the move, proposing a recurrent unavoidable movement of dissatisfaction and despair†¦Ã¢â‚¬  Ailey has disconnected this story to depict the woman’s despair. BEEN ON A TRAIN The utilization of the percussive piano accents according to development. For instance, the dynamic accentuation of the signals Ailey employments. â€Å"The intensity of Cry radiates from its resistant moving pictures of personality in its first area, the unlimited chasm of distress drew closer in its subsequent segment and the extraordinary nature of blissful confidence occupied with the third section.† â€Å" Cry got meaningful as a demonstration of synchronous insubordination and discharge. As a delineation of contemporary African Americanâ identity, the move freed crowd and artist in itsâ modernistic layering of development types, particularly itsâ conspicuous utilization of neoAfrican body part isolations.† In this work there are three particular segments and for each new segment, there is another tune that is played. The melodies utilized in this work are ‘Something About John Coltrane’ by Alice Coltrane, ‘Been On A Train’ by Laura Nyro and ‘Right On. Be Free.’ by The Voices Of East Harlem. In a few these tunes the word ‘north’ is utilized a considerable amount. My personalâ interpretation is that these slaves maybe observed opportunity and additionally shelter in North America, wished to be there however something halted them. She obviously showed Ailey’s mother’s battles just as some other African American woman’s battles at the time as a captive to their battle for opportunity.

Monday, July 27, 2020

Mondays and Tuesdays and the Spaces Between

Mondays and Tuesdays and the Spaces Between Right now I am in Florida, at a campground just outside Miami, where my family has migrated every winter for more than a decade. It’s raining gently, so I am marooned on a bench under the roof of the laundry building. There are palm trees, and though it is overcast and colder than it has been most mornings, it is very different from Boston. With this (totally intentional) distance, I want to tell you about four days this past semester: a Monday, a Tuesday, and another Monday and Tuesday. Monday, December 1 12:01 am: The plane shakes, service carts squeaking behind us. Cory is reading a book (I think it was One Hundred Years of Solitude). I am working on my novel, or making a sad attempt to work on my novel, inspired by Cory’s amazing NaNoWriMo progress (he wrote a novel). The city gets larger in the window, nighttime Boston like a wet spiderweb beneath us. We are flying back from Thanksgiving break with my family in Myrtle Beach (another migrationâ€"my family lives in Pennsylvania). “Happy Monday,” I say. 9:15 am: I wake up, 20 minutes before lecture. 9:45-ish am: 7.06 (cell bio) lecture. I’m going to flatter myself by saying that I am 10 minutes late, but I am probably not 10 minutes late. I call my mom on the way there, then stop by a QuickPrint station in the Infinite for paper to take notes on and Café 4 for coffee. I find a seat in the back row next to Ceri, spill my coffee on my notes and myself, and copy over the notes that are still on the board from the part of lecture I missed. I try to multitask, which is almost never a good idea, and check my email, which I’m going to pretend is okay because I am in the back row. I feel very bad about this because part of my job as a 6.005 TA is to make sure that people are paying attention in class. I look around to make sure I don’t see any students I recognize, and sink a little lower in my seat thinking of the decent proportion of the 200-something 6.005 students I probably wouldn’t recognize and who might be in 7.06 lecture with me. There are something between 20 and 30 emails specifically addressed to me, besides those that are addressed to my dorm or another social mailing list, which Gmail filters out for me. Most of them aren’t actionable and I punt them. Exam grading, which I couldn’t make it to because of lecture, is done, and that is wonderful. 10:50-11:00-ish am: Lecture is over. I walk through the Infinite with Ceri. We stop by Café 4 again and I copy Ceri and buy juice (the one flavor I’m not allergic to). We split up somewhere in building 56, she to lecture, me to Stata, my home base for the semester. I sit down at a table on the first floor with my juice, turn on Taylor Swift’s new album, and start digging myself out of my inbox. 11:11 am: I get an email from the MFA (Museum of Fine Arts, which MIT students get free admission to), forward it to Cory, and think about how we should go to the MFA. 11:25 am: I get bored of Stata and decide to move to Hayden to grade problem sets. On the way there I run into Geronimo M. ‘16, who is one my best friend’s boyfriends, my own close friend, and a current 6.005 student. This is a theme in college: as you get older, your mentors and mentees start to be your friends and your peers and stop being much separated in age from you, if at all. He says something that I don’t remember and I mumble something nonsensical about having 9:30 am lecture and then we part ways. As I enter the library I have a sudden, urgent realization that I’m not wearing closed-toed shoes, and then I remember that I’m in a library. I find a seat on the second floor overlooking the Charles and Boston and lower the shades so the sun isn’t on the desk. I email my 6.005 groups from phase II (networking the pingball game students created in phase I) of the project to set up today’s feedback meetings and my new 6.005 groups for phase III of the project (a pret ty user interface for the pingball game) to set up Wednesday’s check-off meetings. There is some back and forth about grades that just got released. There are also some emails about weird hissing sounds outside my dorm. Apparently there is a dragon. I don’t remember what I was grading but I must have been grading, because my notes on the rest of the hour are the following: “I’m dancing on my own. I make the moves up as I go.” I dislike grading. Grading is probably the only part of being a TA that I don’t like, though I’ve gotten more used to it. Problem sets in 6.005 happen in two phases: after the first, I get to give students feedback that they then use to revise their code for the second phase; after the second phase, I grade, and there are no more revisions. I very much like giving feedback that students can immediately use. I don’t like taking away points and making people sad. Hopefully the feedback is still useful. 11:50 am: 6.005 is in 15 minutes. I go to the basement to get Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett, the third book in a trilogy that Cory and I started over the summer upon the recommendation of my 6.005 professor and now TA boss. There aren’t a lot of Terry Pratchett books in the usual place, and there is no Raising Steam, but I do notice a book with a title I’d fantasized about using for a novel I outlined but probably won’t write, Small Gods. I decide to read that instead. I check it out and go back to Stata for 6.005. 12:05-3:25 pm is class, and then helping students after class. 6.005 class is Mondays and Wednesdays 12 to 1:30 and Fridays 12 to 1. Usually there is a combination of lecture and group exercises but right now there are feedback meetings and worktime for projects. I call my mom again on the way home and don’t notice until it’s almost too late to wave that I walked past my boss on the bike path down Vassar (sorry). 3:25-4:05 pm: I go to Shaw’s, the grocery store a block from Random, and then I eat soup. 4:05-6:00 pm: I sit at desk, where I get paid by the hour to guard packages and, formerly, let people into the building. There’s a new security system so I no longer let people into the building, but I am still very good at guarding packages. Kevin M. ‘18 stops by to pick up a package, I deliver to him his package and no one else’s, and then I guard from him the packages that are not his, not that he would try to take them and not that he would succeed if he did, because I am very good at guarding packages, and we chat about our Thanksgiving breaks. He leaves and I go back to grading. 6:00-7:52 pm: More grading, now somewhere else because my desk shift is over. 7:52-11:53 pm: Cory and I watch two episodes of Breaking Bad. I clean the room and put away clean laundry while listening to Writing Excuses, a podcast that Cory found sometime this past year. Each episode is 15 minutes long and focuses on some aspect of making up stories. A week later, the following Monday, it snowed. It was dry snow, and only a small amount, and it blew into the sidewalk cracks like dust. Probably sometime before midnight it turned into real snow, big snowflakes, covering the city in a thin layer. I stayed up til 5 am working on a personal coding project and then decided to be less irresponsible and went to sleep. In the week since the previous Monday I got sick, bought fuzzy socks and leg warmers and warm slippers, got a Broad email address, waited for and then completed my online orientation (online because the in-person orientation conflicted with 7.06 lecture), graded 6.005 problem set 4, and started mentoring my 6.005 groups for phase III of the project. Here is a picture of Massachusetts Avenue between Random and campus (campus ahead, Random behind us) and the small dome, the most memorable part of MIT that faces into Massachusetts Avenue, on the way home from meeting with students in the Student Center one evening (campus and Mass. Ave. ahead, Student Center behind us):   And here are pictures of my new fuzzy socks and leg warmers:   The next day, Tuesday, December 9 10:30 am: I wake up, probably pretty unhappy since I’d gone to sleep five hours ago, or maybe pretty happy since sleep deprivation is a good (temporary) mood booster. I drink coffee and I breakfast on leftover ricotta cheesecake from Shaw’s. It’s raining hard and it is slightly windy. Together the rain and wind have taken out the snow, which was much more pleasant than the rain. I wonder at Cambridge’s ability to rain even when it’s below freezing. Living in Cambridge, you learn quickly which shoes are merely waterproof and which shoes are both waterproof and warm. My new ID, and a draft of this blog post (so meta!). 11:50 am: I arrive at the Broad. The Broad is next door to the Whitehead Institute, where I used to work a few years ago, and across the street from Stata. I get my new ID card and my new mentor shows me my new office, which is breathtaking. I have an entire third of an office, another third of which is unoccupied and the final third of which is occupied by my 6.047 (computational biology, which used to be an extra recitation of 6.046, algorithms, but which is now its own class) TA from a few years ago, whom I haven’t yet seen since then but am really excited to run into. Many of the walls at the Broad are clear glass, and I worry that someday after hours I will injure myself walking into one of them, like a large bird. I don’t yet have a project, so I send my parents an email about my beautiful new office and then I have to go. 12:51 pm: I head to my office hours, across the street in Stata. This is only my second time inside the Broad so I get down to the wrong exit, then go back up and back down again rather than spend an extra few minutes in the rain. Somehow I still make it to the seventh floor of Stata on time. (Do you know what is terrible? Being late to your own office hours is terrible.) 3:01 pm: I leave office hours, go home, put away my floorcloset, and hang out with Cory. At this point the streets are shallow lakes, and you can see the wind in them before it hits you. 4:06 pm: I have desk, which I am late to. I don’t remember and didn’t write down what I did for the rest of the day, but I imagine it was some mix of sleeping and Internet and grading and that’s why I didn’t write it down. I think I might have intended to go to yoga but fell asleep instead. In the following week, phase III of the 6.005 project got finished by the students and then graded by the TAs. I hung out with some of the bloggers at Chris P.’s house, where we watched horrible things on the Internet and everyone got really acquainted with my love for Taylor Swift. Half or so of the new freshmen got in and I got to hang out with them on the Internet. Next Monday, December 15 4:30 am: I wake up. I was sick the previous day (Cory got sick and then I got sick, probably with something entirely unrelated) and I am relieved to find that so far I seem to not be sick anymore. I read the textbook to study for the 7.06 exam, which is Tuesday at 9 am, which is even earlier than the usual 9:30 am lecture. 6:15-7:30 am: I get tired of reading and go to yoga at Prana Power Yoga, which is a six-minute walk from Random, and then I get home and crash. 2:00 pm: I wake up again and read some more from the textbook. Cory brings me tea a few times. At some point I take a break to go to Shaw’s with Cory and we buy cookies and tea biscuits. The sun sets. I stay up all night reading and doing practice problems and putting together my cheat sheets for the exam. I use both colored penciles and glitter glue, and I am thrilled to finally have a use for glitter glue.   Here is my favorite textbook passage from that evening, about shmooing:   Then it is Tuesday and I have eaten almost the entire 1800-Calorie tin of cookies. 9-10:30 am: The exam. I take with me in the tin, along with the remaining few cookies, some pancakes that our Housemaster, GRTs, and RLAD have cooked for us who have finals, and, in a travel mug that GRT Shaiyan lends me, some coffee. It is not a cumulative exam, which is a lot better than it being a cumulative exam. It is also my only final, which is a lot better than it being followed by more exams. When it is done my semester is also done. On the way home I go to MITFCU to apply for a credit card, because somehow I have become a financially independent adult. Then I go home. Cory is gone at this point. He left for California for winter break while I was at my final. I hang out with Arianna M., who is at desk, and we talk about money and bills. I buy bus tickets and crash again. I wake up at 4:15 pm. 4:30-6:something pm: The final grades meeting for 6.005, on the seventh floor of Stata. I don’t cry, not that I expected to (cough). There is only one argument. The final parting of the course staff is bittersweet and not as spectacular as I would have liked. We’ve been through a lot together. I feel a strange emptiness that might be emotions but might be hunger and sleep deprivation. I get home, call home (my other home), and eat that evening’s finals dinner (Mediterranean), organized for us by our wonderful Housemaster, GRTs, and RLAD. I fill the fish bowl with the water Cory had treated and left out, clean my room, and leave a quick note for Snake Eyes, who is feeding our fish at least once over break. 9:53 pm: I am on a bus in South Station (five stops away from Central, which is where Random is, or four stops away from Kendall (East Campus and most of MIT)), seven minutes early. I call my parents to brag about my surprising punctuality and then I read Pride and Prejudice on my Kindle, which is a second-generation Kindle from a very long time ago and therefore awesome. Cory took Small Gods with him to California. I am going through a Jane Austen phase since we watched Sense and Sensibility with my family over Thanksgiving break. I play “Welcome to New York” as the bus pulls into New York City, which is an extra-happy three and a half minutes. A pigeon I saw at Port Authority. 2:30 am: A layover in NYC in Port Authority. I buy some orange juice and regretful Fritos, claim my own patch of floor where the line for my next bus will form in three and a half hours, and read Pride and Prejudice some more. 6:15 am: I get on a bus out of NYC. It’s heading to Baltimore and stopping in Harrisburg, State College, and Altoona. The bus is almost empty: there are six, maybe seven people, and half of them get off at Penn Station. I get an entire two seats to myself, which is wonderful. I read more Pride and Prejudice while listening to Belle and Sebastian and Taylor Swift. I break 100 listens of 1989. 12:50 pm: The bus finally pulls into State College, a block away from the IST/Computer Science building where I took what I think is the Penn State version of 6.005 five years ago, and stayed up all night battling segfaults in the winter with my nerdy friend who could drive stick shift (so could I, but he actually had a license). My dad picks me up and drives me home. I hang out with my dad, then my dad goes to work and my brother Max comes home and I hang out with Max until I awkwardly fall asleep on the couch. I have vague memories of him making and offering me cookies but I am rude and I slept through that. I dropped and broke our Salvador Dalí mug when it was full of tea, dropped another mug full of tea, and finally decided it was time to go to bed.   The  Dalí mug, which now looks like a Dalí painting, and an ornament my mom and my brother made. A day later my mom, my dad, Max, and I roadtripped our yearly migration to Florida. Another semester is over, another year is ending, and we have come full circle to where I am now. I have been wanting to do this kind of time accounting for a while (though nowadays it is less relevant to you, since I am no longer a full-time undergrad and am instead a master’s student and a TA, and since I just got a thesis I don’t think I’m even a typical master’s student). It’s probably the most important thing to consider when you consider a college, but it is also not what defines my MIT life. There’s so much variety in my day-to-day from week to week. I thought when I came to MIT that my strongest memories of college would be up late studying, but instead I live in the moments between, and that’s where my memories form. That Monday night when I was studying (“studying”) for my 7.06 final I stumbled on a tumblr post by Selam G. ‘18, who just finished her first semester. I think she does a wonderful job of capturing the feeling of the moments that really stay: Those of you who’ve been with me longest know of these posts. Occasionally, when I go outside and see something cool, I’ll make a “today I went adventuring” post. Sometimes I go outside explicitly for the sake of seeing cool things, and in part to make such a post. But since I’ve been so busy lately, today just happened by chance. I took my first MIT final this morning, Physics Mechanics. It went ok, I think. Right outside the testing centers there were people stationed to give us high fives, encouraging notes, and hot chocolate. That was nice; I wish we had that in high school. Afterward I wanted to sleep but I also needed to exercise. Since the weather was nice outside and more finals were being held in the gym, I decided to run outside today. Everyone says the run along the charles river is “so nice”, but I haven’t yet thought that. If it is, then it’s not on whatever part of the river I’m running along. I’ve been so spoiled by the abundant parks and trails and public spaces connecting every neighborhood of Colorado that I can’t stand running next to cars, roads, or highways, and the section of the Charles right in front of MIT has all of those. So today, I just ran into the bit of Cambridge behind my dorm. It’s so nice out there. There are neighborhoods and parks, and it all has a very homey feel to it. I ended up running to Whole Foods without realizing it. There were fallen leaves all along the sidewalk and the sun was shining and the weather was crisp. It’s like today was a re-do of fall, which I quite liked. I came upon this park and playground that had this really fun-looking play structure on it, which was designed to seem carved from wood into a big birds nest. It was a nice, peaceful day that I took for myself. Sometimes it’s nice to just explore on your own and think for a bit. Sometimes, it’s nice to just breathe a little slower.             (P.S. the cat is actually from a few days ago, when I went with some Chocolate City friends (pictured in the background) to Boston. There was a cozy bookstore we went into, and it had its very own cat.) This year I’ll be coming back to start work on my thesis, but last year I stayed home for IAP. At the start of January I went to a New Year’s yoga class with my mom, which set my pace and resolutions for this past year. We learned pranayama breathing: inhale, pause, exhale, pause, inhale, pause, and so on. There are the active inhales and exhales, but the peaceful seconds betweenâ€"stolen breaks between p-sets, long walks alone or with friends, watching the snow fall onto the rooftop below my windowâ€"are the ones I remember and live in. One of my most vivid memories is likely closer to your life right now, from my senior year of high school. My MIT interview was on campus (Penn State’s, not MIT’s), on the same street my classes were on, so I was early. I went across the street to that same IST/Computer Science building and paced through the rose bushes outside. Moreso than the interview itself or the rest of that busy year, more than five years later I can still feel that walk. There was snow on the roses and cold air in my lungs. My breath came out in thick white gusts. The snow crunched under my boots, bright in the sun.

Friday, May 22, 2020

Trojan Asteroids and their Places in the Solar System

Asteroids are hot properties of the solar system these days. Space agencies are interested in exploring them, mining companies may soon be taking them apart for their minerals, and planetary scientists are interested in the role they played in the early solar system. It turns out that Earth and nearly all the other planets owe a large part of their existence to asteroids, which contributed to the process of planetary formation. Understanding Asteroids Asteroids are rocky objects too small to be planets or moons, but orbit in various parts of the solar system. When astronomers or planetary scientists discuss ​asteroids, they usually think about the region in the solar system where many of them exist; its called the Asteroid Belt and  lies  between Mars and Jupiter. While the majority of the asteroids in our solar system seem to orbit in the Asteroid Belt, there are other groups that orbit the Sun at various distances in both the inner and outer solar system. Among these are the so-called Trojan Asteroids, which are individually named after figures in the legendary Trojan Wars from Greek myths. Nowadays, planetary scientists simply refer to them as trojans.   The Trojan Asteroids First discovered in 1906, the Trojan asteroids orbit the Sun along the same orbital path of a planet or a  Ã¢â‚¬â€¹moon. Specifically, they either lead or follow the planet or moon by 60 degrees. These positions are known as the L4 and L5 Lagrange points. (LaGrange points are positions where the gravitational effects from two larger objects, the Sun and a planet, in this case, will hold a small object like an asteroid in a stable orbit.)  There are Trojans orbiting Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune.   Jupiters Trojans Trojan asteroids were suspected to exist as far back as 1772 but werent observed for some time. The mathematical justification for the existence of Trojan asteroids was developed in 1772 by Joseph-Louis Lagrange. The  application of the theory he developed led to his name being attached to it.   However, it was not until 1906 that asteroids were found at the L4 and L5 Lagrange points along Jupiters orbit.  Recently, researchers have found that there may be a very large number of Trojan asteroids around Jupiter. This makes sense since Jupiter has a very strong gravitational pull and likely captured more asteroids into its area of influence.  Some say there are could be as many around Jupiter as there are in the Asteroid Belt. However, recent studies have found that there may be systems of Trojan asteroids elsewhere in our solar system. These may actually outnumber the asteroids in both the Asteroid Belt and Jupiters Lagrange points by an order of magnitude (i.e. there could be at least more than 10 times more). Additional Trojan Asteroids In one sense, Trojan asteroids should be easy to find. After all, if they orbit at the L4 and L5 Lagrange points around planets, so observers know exactly where to look for them. However, since most of the planets in our solar system are very far away from Earth and because asteroids can be very tiny and incredibly hard to detect, the process of finding them, and then measuring their orbits, is not very simple. In fact, it can be very difficult!   As evidence of this, consider that the ONLY Trojan asteroid is known to orbit along Earths path — 60 degrees in front of us — was just  confirmed to exist in 2011!  There are also seven confirmed Mars Trojan asteroids. So, the process of finding these objects in their predicted orbits around other worlds requires painstaking work and a great many observations at different times of the year to get a direct and accurate measure of their orbital periods.   Most interesting though is the presence of Neptunian Trojan asteroids. While there around a dozen confirmed, there are many more candidates. If confirmed, they would significantly outnumber the combined asteroid count of the Asteroid Belt and Jupiter Trojans. This is a very good reason for continuing to study this distant region of the solar system.   There still could be additional groups of Trojan asteroids orbiting various objects in our solar system, but as yet these are the sum total of what we have found. More surveys of the solar system, particularly using infrared observatories, could turn up many additional Trojans orbiting among the planets.   Edited and revised by Carolyn Collins Petersen.

Saturday, May 9, 2020

Canterbury Tales Character Analysis - 981 Words

Upon first reading of the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, the reoccurring theme of social status is not blatantly obvious. Upon further reading, however, it becomes apparent that it in fact plays large role in most of the aspects of the tales. In both the Wife of Bath’s Tale and the Nun’s Priest Tale, social status plays a role in the plot, characters, and themes in order to more effectively portray the messages Chaucer is trying to get across. The underlying theme addressing social status in The Wife of Bath’s Tale plays a larger role in the plot than one might think. The whole tale is essentially about a knights search to find what women really desire in a relationship as a punishment for raping a young maiden, and the social†¦show more content†¦This is a direct commentary on the similar doing of the aristocracy of Chaucer’s day. The social standing of Chanticleer allows Chaucer to better portray his intentions of calling out the aristo cracy through the plot of the tale. Social Status also seems to play a large role on the characters in both the tales being discussed. The Knight, in the Wife of Bath’s Tale, is completely consumed by his social status. His feeling of superiority is the main reason why he assaults the young maiden and why he despises his wife at the end. The influence his class has on him is most apparent in the scene when he exposes his thoughts on his marriage to his new wife, who is of a lesser class. He describes her as being â€Å"so poor to start with, so low-bred to follow†¦Ã¢â‚¬  (288), which emphasizes the arrogance that comes from his social standing, and shows how he feels about people of a lower class. In conclusion, the way the Knight acts throughout the story and how his character is portrayed is largely influenced by social status. The characters in the Nun’s Priest Tale are also very largely influenced by social status. Chanticleer, who’s described as â₠¬Å"his comb was redder than fine coral, tall and battlemented like a castle wall, his bill was black and shone bright as jet, like azure were his legs and they were set on azure toes with nails ofShow MoreRelatedCanterbury Tales Character Analysis1988 Words   |  8 Pages The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer, is a collection of tales and prologues of stories told by many characters whilst on a pilgrimage to the city of Canterbury. From religious figures such as nuns, monks and pardoners; to doctors, cooks and millers, this pilgrimage embarked on by many interesting people with stories that range from inspiring to gruesome. A few of the most predominant stories include those of the Prioress, the Summoner, the Wife of Bath, the Miller, and the Reeve. In theseRead MoreCanterbury Tales Character Analysis997 Words   |  4 Pageslanguage of the common people (Morrison). 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Therefore, the ecclesiastical persona has the dispositionsRead MoreCanterbury Tales Character Analysis1272 Words   |  6 PagesThe Canterbury Tales, penned by Geoffrey Chaucer gives its audiences insight on the corruption that e xists to this day in humanity. As you read through the chapters Chaucer reveals the dark sides to supposedly respectable people such as the Summoner, along with people he favors like the Knight, the Wife of Bath, and women in general. His comical descriptions and stories that coincide with each character express his thoughts on real people in his society. My perception of the Summoner’s tale moralRead MoreCanterbury Tales Character Analysis1457 Words   |  6 Pages The Canterbury Tales introduces a group of very interesting characters from different walks of life. These characters can fall into different groups, and these groups show society was divided up in the 14th century. The descriptions of these characters give an idea on how these groups worked. How were people ranked in social status? Were certain people more corrupt than others? Which characteristics caused the people to be sorted into the group they are in? These questions are answered by the differentRead More Character Analysis of The Wife of Bath of Chaucers Canterbury Tales1623 Words   |  7 Pages Character Analysis of The Wife of Bath of Chaucers Canterbury Tales The Canterbury Tales is Geoffrey Chaucers greatest and most memorable work. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer uses a fictitious pilgrimage [to Canterbury] as a framing device for a number of stories (Norton 79). In The General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer describes in detail the pilgrims he meets in the inn on their way to Canterbury. Chaucer is the author, but also a character and the narrator, and acts likeRead MoreThe Canterbury Tales : An Analysis Of Medieval Life By Geoffrey Chaucer939 Words   |  4 PagesCanterbury Tales: An Analysis of Medieval Life by Geoffrey Chaucer The Canterbury Tales is strongly considered one of the greatest works in medieval literature. An admirer of Chaucer, and the author of Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century, H.S. Bennett describes Chaucer’s unique style as, â€Å"No detail was too small for him to observe, and from it he could frequently draw, or suggest, conclusions which would have escaped many.† While The Canterbury Tales was originally intended to be an epic poemRead MoreThe Caterbury Tales, Carmina Burana and The Book of Taliesin722 Words   |  3 PagesChaucer’s Canterbury Tales, to the legendary king and war-hero Arthur of Camelot. The Christian Church was the single most influential institution in society, with the pope taking on a role as the leader of European Christendom and education and intellectual life mostly happening through religious institutions. Through the analysis of compositions written during the Middle Ages, it is observable that significant events influenced the page s of these notable works such as Canterbury Tales, Carmina BuranaRead More Summary and Analysis of The Shipmans Tale (The Canterbury Tales)928 Words   |  4 PagesSummary and Analysis of The Shipmans Tale (The Canterbury Tales) Introduction to the Shipmans Tale: The Host asks the priest to tell a tale, but the Shipman interrupts, insisting that he will tell the next tale. He says that he will not tell a tale of physics or law or philosophy, but rather a more modest story. The Shipmans Tale: A merchant at St. Denis foolishly took a desirable woman for a wife who drained his income by demanding clothes and other fine array to make her appearRead More Analysis of The Canons Yeomans Tale Essay762 Words   |  4 PagesSummary and Analysis of The Canons Yeomans Tale (The Canterbury Tales) Prologue to the Canons Yeomans Tale: When the story of Saint Cecilia was finished and the company continued on their journey, they came across two men. One of them was clad all in black and had been traveling quickly on their horses; the narrator believes that he must be a canon (an alchemist). The Canons Yeoman said that they wished to join the company on their journey, for they had heard of their tales. The Host asked

Wednesday, May 6, 2020

Sunshine Chapter 7 Free Essays

string(46) " the mornings for coffee and a cinnamon roll\." â€Å"You tell time real well,† I said. â€Å"Is that an important skill in SOF? Mary will fit on the stool. You won’t. We will write a custom essay sample on Sunshine Chapter 7 or any similar topic only for you Order Now † I kept a stool wedged in the one semifree corner that wasn’t next to the ovens, for staff on break, or anyone else I felt like letting into my territory. No SOF was on that list tonight, and I wasn’t in a good mood. Jesse went and sat on the stool. He did fit. SOF made you keep in shape to keep your job. No lard butts there. The SOFs weren’t that much easier to keep topped up than teenage boys. All that fitness makes you eat. Pat in particular could put it away. When he sat on that stool I had to keep a sharp eye on him. He could make whole loaves of bread disappear in moments. I opened the oven doors and dragon breath roared into the room. I shoved in muffin tins. I closed the doors and set the timer. I dumped the bowls in the sink and turned on the water. The coffeehouse doesn’t have the most efficient layout in the world, and the dishwasher is in the main kitchen. When I had time, I washed up my own stuff. I made as much noise as possible. â€Å"Rae,† said Jesse at last. â€Å"Yeah,† I said. â€Å"We’re on the same side.† I didn’t say anything. Are we? Am I sure I’m on the right side any more? It was a very pretty conundrum. People don’t escape from vampires. Since I’m alive†¦It wasn’t really consorting with the enemy. It was just something that happened. Yeah, and it just happened that I could keep the sun off a vampire. It wasn’t him I needed to forget. It was me. It was what I had done. Why would a vampire stick around to feed a human milk and muffins – and make sure she didn’t choke on them? Honor among thieves? I’d said that. To him. Why the hell had I wanted to save him? He’d almost had me for dinner. He’d thought about it. Why had my tree said yessssss? What the hell was I? Maybe the fact that the vampire slash on my breast hurt all the time and wouldn’t heal was a good sign. Maybe it meant I was still human. Eventually Jesse got down from the stool and went away. The nightmares that night were particularly bad, and apparently I’d been clawing myself in my sleep, because when the alarm went off at three-forty-five and I groaned and rolled over and turned the light on, not only had the scab split open again but my pillow had big ugly streaks and blotches of blood all over it. The alarm was still going off a quarter hour earlier than it used to because it took me a quarter hour longer to get moving in the morning than it used to. I was still tired all the time. Okay, it was just the nightmares stopping me sleeping properly. Plus worrying about stuff like my face in the globenet archive and what all my friends thought. I wasn’t losing enough blood from the vampire slash to make me tired that way. And it didn’t hurt all that much. It was just a nagging nuisance. I drove to the coffeehouse and made cinnamon rolls and rye bread – it was rye bread day – and then I made banana honey nut bread and fig bars and Hell’s Angelfood and Killer Zebras and a lot of muffins, and by late morning I was done. I had the rest of the day off till six. There was one thing that helped the tiredness a little, and stopped my breast prickling and itching as well. Sunlight. It was a glorious, blue, sunny day and I went home and lay in it. For nearly seven hours. I should have burned to a crisp, but I never sunburn. It goes in somewhere. I’ve always been like this. But since those two nights on the lake I’d been spending more time than usual when the sun was out, lying in it. And I seemed to be doing more and more of it. I’d missed an old-books fair with Aimil and Zora, and the last time Mel’d suggested we go hiking I’d opted to lie in the sun in his back yard while he took another motorcycle apart. This was fine with him but it wasn’t at all like me. I wasn’t even reading as much as usual; it was as if I had to concentrate on soaking in as much sunshine as I could, and didn’t dare distract myself from that crucial activity. Okay, I had a lot of catching up to do. The part of me that was my grandmother’s granddaughter had been having a free ride the last fifteen years, and out of nowhere I’d tapped her flat. Whether for good cause or bad. Recharging was in order. But it wasn’t just that. It was like I was under attack. And it didn’t feel like it was only from my own negative thinking. There were more people than usual at the coffeehouse that evening too, but not as many as the night before, and there were no TV vans and nothing to make me jumpy, except maybe that six of our little SOF gang were there. Six? Didn’t these people have lives’? No, they didn’t have lives. SOFs weren’t expected to have lives. You were a SOF, you stayed very fit and you didn’t have a life. A bit like running a family coffeehouse really. Maybe that was why they felt we should be kindred spirits. And our SOFs had dinner at the coffeehouse more nights than they didn’t, and a lot of the staff from our county SOF headquarters, which was only about a half a mile away north of Old Town, came by some time in the mornings for coffee and a cinnamon roll. You read "Sunshine Chapter 7" in category "Essay examples" Relax, Sunshine. I tried to relax. They released the name of the poor bod that had got sucked: nobody any of us knew. He lived in our city, but not around here. Nothing else happened. No more dry guys, at least none left for us to find. By three days later when things appeared to be back to normal I managed to say, â€Å"Hey, how’s it going,† in an ordinary voice when I found Jesse and Theo sitting at the table next to the door when I walked in for the evening dessert shift. Paulie had been in the bakery all afternoon, and he was eager to leave. I was still letting him have most any evening he wanted off, letting him put his hours in during the days; I was chiefly interested in that second morning a week I didn’t have to get up at three-forty-five. I was used to not having a life, and I wanted to hold on to Paulie. He was the first apprentice I’d hired who both had a brain and liked playing with food. Also he was the first guy who didn’t seem to think his manhood wa s under threat by having to learn stuff and take orders from someone of my age and gender. He still had to live through his first August in the bakery with the ovens on, but I was hopeful. We emptied out a little earlier than sometimes, especially surprising on a three-day-weekend Sunday. We’d be open tomorrow while most of the rest of the working world was celebrating the birth of Jasmin Aziz, the famous code-breaker of the Voodoo Wars and why we still have Michigan, Chippewa, and most of Ontario instead of the biggest smoking hole on the planet. But she had been nicknamed Mother Durga, â€Å"She Who Is Difficult to Approach,† long before she was a hero, and the name stuck. Ha. Even if Charlie’s didn’t stay open automatically for three-day weekend Mondays, we’d’ve had to stay open for that one. I’d pulled the last trays out of the ovens a while back, racked or frozen what wasn’t going to get eaten that night, started roll and bread dough for tomorrow morning, and had come out front to sit at the counter and gossip for the last few minutes with Liz and Kyoko, who were on late that night, and Emmy, who had recently been promoted to assistant cook and wasn’t sure she could take the pace. (I was slightly insulted by this, since I’d been using her in the bakery between apprentices, and felt that I must be at least as merciless and temperamental a taskmaster as anything the main kitchen crew could do.) Theo showed occasional signs of wanting to get fond of Kyoko, but she knew about SOFs, and she wasn’t having any. Charlie was there, prowling; he didn’t know how to sit down. Mel was closing down in the kitchen, which included preventing Kenny from sloping off early. A quiet night gave you time to catch up. It was warm, and the front doors were open. There were still a few people sitting at one of the outside tables; another couple had drifted off with their cups of coffee to sit on the flower bed wall and smooch. One of the last closing-up rituals was to have a sweep through the square for coffee cups, champagne glasses, and dessert plates. If you paid your bill beforehand, we didn’t stop you taking your sweetheart and your sweet thing on a plate to a quieter spot. (Your bad luck if you chose a spot already occupied by a wino or a hype head, but hey.) This was probably illegal too, by civil regulation 6703.4, subheading Behavior of Clientele at Eating Establishments and Potential Broadcasting of Crumbs to Deleterious Effect, viz., the Vermin Population, but no one had stopped us yet. It was so quiet. Peaceful. Even the SOFs looked pretty relaxed, for SOFs. And I heard a familiar goblin giggle. Did I hear it? I don’t know. I’ll never know. But I knew it, one way or another, however it got to me. And I had picked up a table knife and bolted out the door long before any poor following-on function like rational thought had a chance to kick into gear. No human has ever destroyed a vampire by thundering down on it brandishing a table knife. In the first place, vampires are fantastically faster than humans. You can’t race up to a vampire to do anything, because it’s done it several times already, waiting for you. And you can bet it’s not going to stand there waiting to be staked. In the second place, a table knife is a real bad choice. You can do it with wrought iron, although no one in their right mind is going to haul a wrought iron stake around with them when wood works better and weighs a lot less. But stainless steel, forget it: it slithers off, like a swizzle stick on an ice cube. You have as much chance of punching a hole in a vampire with stainless steel as you have racing up to it and getting it to hold still while you try. Wood will break through that little layer of whatever-it-is, the electricity of the undead, and let your stake penetrate. You still have to ram it in hard, and you have to know where it’s going, and it has to reach and enter the heart, or you’ve just died as the vampire rips your head off. A sucker repelling a staking doesn’t bother to be cool about it. (Note that while a vampire may have to ask permission to suck your blood, it can kill you any time it likes. It just won’t get a square meal out of the experience.) Macho SOFs will go straight in through the breastbone, but the more sophisticated approach – as well as the more likely to be successful – is up underneath it. The notch at the bottom of the breastbone is a useful road marker – so I’m told. It’s still not at all easy to do. There are lots of dead people who have tried. There have been a lot of studies done about the best wood for stakes too. Turns out itâ€℠¢s apple wood – and not any old apple, but a tree that is home to mistletoe. Retired or invalided-out SOFs (this latter category a small number: SOFs tend to live or die with nothing in between) often end up tending SOF orchards, and making sure the mistletoe is happy. Mistletoe is cranky stuff, and nobody knows why it sometimes grows and sometimes doesn’t. Makes you wonder what the druids knew – or Johnny Appleseed. Of course the druids are a fairy tale and Johnny Appleseed never existed. They say. But then, they also say that no human has ever destroyed a vampire by charging at one flashing a table knife. Maybe no human ever had. I did have one advantage. He wasn’t expecting me. I had time to see the look on his face. I probably didn’t figure out what I’d seen till later, but this was what it was: he was looking for me – for me – but he wasn’t expecting to find me. He was working under his master’s orders, all right, but privately he thought his master had a wild hair up his ass, and he wasn’t going to find me, because I was dead. He didn’t know how I was dead, or where I had disappeared to, but I had to be dead. Therefore I was. I understood this point of view completely. Maybe it was just the surprise of seeing someone thinking they could do anything with a table knife. He paused. The girl he’d been pulling under stood swaying and stupid while he turned to me. We stared into each other’s eyes for the last time fragment, my last few running steps, before I thudded into him†¦ †¦and slammed the table knife up under his breastbone, and into his heart. I remember the hot evil smell of his last breath on my face†¦ I’d never heard or read anywhere that vampires explode when staked. Maybe it’s only when you use a table knife. Vampires aren’t made of flesh and blood quite the way we are†¦but near kali goddam enough. It was†¦horrible. The contact, when I drove against him, not just arm’s length with the knife – The sense of the knife going in – maybe I didn’t think I was going to be able to do it either; maybe that was the plan – The texture of the knife sliding into – The way it seemed to know where to go, with my hand on it – The smell – The surprise on his face, just before my knife reached his heart and it stopped – being a face – The sound – The pressure of the – blast – which made me stagger, which smeared and stained me with – From the taste in my mouth a few minutes later, I assume I threw up. Maybe I passed out as well, although I was still on my feet when I began to hear someone shouting, â€Å"Rae! Rae! It’s over! You’re okay!† and also began to realize there were arms around me and they were trying to stop me thrashing around. There was a lot of other noise; someone screaming; other people shouting; and, coming closer, a siren. The siren should have been reassuring: the sound of approaching authority. Authority would take over and I could relax. Relax, Sunshine. It wasn’t reassuring. But it did have the effect of sobering me up. I stopped flailing. The arms loosened – not very much – and let me stand on my own feet. It was Jesse, holding on to me. There was already a crowd. I suppose the screaming brought them. We’re the kind of neighborhood that responds to screams. Jesse and I were in a little alleyway – one alley over from where the corpse husk, the dry guy, had been found a week ago – and from somewhere someone had found a couple of halogen floodlights. This meant you could see†¦ I started retching, and Jesse turned me round and started hauling me toward – what turned out to be a car, driven by Theo. It’s a good trick, getting anything with four wheels, including a kid’s little red wagon, this far into Old Town. Maybe that’s part of SOF training too. The crowd was still gathering. Maybe they didn’t understand what they were seeing – the dark, dribbling blotches on the ground, stickily trailing down the enclosing walls – the charnel house smell might have been a dead rat or a backed-up drain; Old Town can be like that – but the scene the floodlights illuminated†¦I managed to look away before I heaved again, not, I think, that there was anything left to come up. Jesse bundled me into the back seat and was now†¦wiping me down with a towel. I had†¦horrible stuff all over me. Did SOF vehicles automatically carry large absorbent towels for†¦cleanup? This one had hung outdoors on a line. I tried to think about the smell of the towel – laundry soap, fresh air, sunlight. I was crying. Less messy than throwing up anyway. Easier to clean up after. I cried harder. I’d cried more in the last two months than I had done in my entire previous life. I croaked something. I didn’t understand what I said either, and Jesse said, â€Å"Don’t talk now. We’re going to get you some clean clothes and a cup of cof – tea.† He knew me well enough to know I didn’t drink coffee. That should have been reassuring too, that I was with friends – but I wasn’t with friends. I was with SOF. Who had seen me explode a sucker with a table knife. I wondered if they were getting me away so fast, before anyone from the coffeehouse had a chance to intervene. Mel. Charlie. Where were they taking me anyway? And why? I could make a guess and it didn’t make me feel any better. Jesse’s dark face was invisible in the darkness of the back seat. I was almost desperate enough to ask to turn the dome light on, just so I could see his face. That he had a face. A human face. I croaked again. â€Å"Will she be all right?† â€Å"Who?† said Jesse. â€Å"The girl. The†¦girl who was screaming. The girl who was†¦under the dark.† Jesse said, â€Å"She’ll be okay.† I was silent a minute. We were out of Old Town. I couldn’t figure what we were doing at first; I was used to the front door of the SOF county building – not that I made a habit of going there – of course there would be a back way. Where they parked their cars. Also perhaps where they brought people in they didn’t want to be seen. How soon before the TV van showed up in the alleyway and started panning over those blotchy walls, those gruesomely amorphous lumps on the pavement? â€Å"You don’t know, do you? You don’t know if she’ll be all right.† Jesse sighed and sat back, leaving the towel in my lap. It didn’t smell like sunlight any more: it smelled like disintegrated vampire. The car smelled like disintegrated vampire. Jesse, because he’d been holding on to me, had disintegrated vampire all over him too. In the flickering light as we went from one streetlight’s aura to the next he looked rather too much like a pied demon. Pied demons are not among the nice ones. â€Å"No. I don’t know. We don’t snatch people out from under the dark at the last minute like that very often. But I’m pretty sure she’ll be all right. I can tell you why, but you could tell us something too. Something for something.† I grunted. I had been rolling my window down for some fresh air, and had discovered that it would only roll down halfway, and that the doorlock button was engaged, but not by me. No escapees from the back seat of a SOF car. He almost laughed. â€Å"It’s not what you think. Hell, Sunshine, what do we have to do to – â€Å" The car stopped. We were in a parking lot tucked in among a lot of big civic-looking buildings. It was nothing like empty, as you might expect it should be at this time of night, although all the cars were parked at one end of the lot, near one particular building. I didn’t recognize SOF HQ from the back, but I could guess that was what it was. Most municipal departments don’t run a big night shift, and the ordinary cop station was across town. The doorlocks popped open. We got out of the car, first Theo and then Jesse again holding my arm, as if I either needed support or might run away. They took me up some stairs and down a long ugly windowless hallway with doors opening off on either side. Eventually Jesse tapped on a cracked-open door with a light behind it. â€Å"Annie,† said Jesse, â€Å"can you give us a hand?† Annie wasn’t reassuring either, but she was nice about trying to pretend that she didn’t think there was something extremely fishy about why I was there and in what condition and at this time of night. After all, she was right: there was something extremely fishy about it. She took me to the women’s shower room and gave me fresh towels, soap, and this shapeless khaki jersey fuzzy-on-the-inside one-piece thing to put on that was like little kids’ pajamas only without the feet. I walked into the shower with all my clothes on. It was harder getting them off wet, but I didn’t want to wait even long enough to get undressed before I made contact with hot water. Then I knelt on the shower floor and scrubbed them – and my sneakers – and left them in a heap I had to keep stepping over while I washed myself. But I wanted all the blood and†¦muck†¦drummed out of them. I wasn’t as long about it as I had been the morning after coming back from the lake, but I scrubbed myself till I hurt all over and came out feeling boiled because I’d had the hot water turned up as high as it would go. I was sweating as I tried to dry off: partly because of the hot water. The cut on my breast had opened again, of course. I put some toilet paper on it, like I’d cut myself shaving, hoping it would scab over enough not to leave bloodstains that might need explaining on the pajamas. I belatedly rescued the contents of my pockets when I hung my sodden clothes over the midsummer-cold radiator. My knife didn’t mind a wetting so long as I dried it off again right away but my leather key ring would probably never forgive me, and the charm loop on it was definitely a goner. It was one of Mom’s charms and it was one of the sort that keep going bzzzt at you so you know they’re paying attention and I hadn’t meant to drown it but I wouldn’t be sorry to have it stop pestering me. I paused a moment when I was dry and dressed to gather together what faculties I had left. I was so tired. Annie was lurking outside to take me to wherever. She offered me some shuffly fuzzy-on-the-inside slippers too, also khaki, but enough is enough with the regression to childhood, and I stayed barefoot. Besides, I hate khaki. I figured it was Jesse’s office, since he was the one sitting behind the desk, while Theo was tipped back in a straight chair to one side, his feet against the edge, the toes of his shoes curling up the messy pile of papers on that corner and leaving black marks on the bottoms of the pages. Tsk tsk. Jesse’s jacket had disappeared and he was wearing a clean shirt that didn’t fit. There was a coffee machine in the corner going glub glub. Nobody said anything right away. If this was supposed to make me start talking to fill up the silence it didn’t work. There wasn’t anything I could say that wouldn’t get me into more trouble than I was in now. Okay, here’s another thing: magic handlers have to be certified and licensed. I had lied about what had happened by the lake for a lot of reasons, and needing to register myself as a magic handler was the least of them and barely worth mentioning from my point of view, but by not doing it I’d still committed the sort of crime that even the ordinary police don’t like and SOF really hates. Tonight I’d totally, inexorably, undeniably, blown it. Even a magic handler shouldn’t have been able to skeg a sucker with a table knife. I wasn’t going to be able to fudge that one either. The table knife in question was lying on the one clear space on Jesse’s desk. I assumed it was the same knife. It was the coffeehouse pattern and while it had been wiped roughly off, the smear of remaining bloodstains was convincing. I had no idea when I’d dropped it. But the fact that it was here meant that they knew what had happened. No escape. And then Pat came in carrying a pot of tea and a paper bag with the Prime Time logo. I wanted to laugh. They were sure trying. The Cinnamon Roll Queen wasn’t going to be bought off by a fast-food hamburger – supposing I ate hamburgers, which I didn’t, and after tonight, even if I had, I’d’ve given them up – but Prime Time was a twenty-four-hour gourmet deli. Downtown, of course. Far too upscale to open a branch in Old Town. Not that they’d survive on Charlie’s turf anyway. I stopped wanting to laugh when I noticed that Pat looked like a man who had been got out of bed for an emergency. It was even good tea. Jesse said, â€Å"Can you tell us what you’re afraid of? Why you won’t talk to us.† I said cautiously, â€Å"Well, I’m not licensed†¦Ã¢â‚¬  There was a general sigh, and the tension level went down about forty degrees. Pat said, â€Å"Yeah, we thought that was probably it.† There was a little silence and then the three of them exchanged long meaningful looks. I had tentatively started to relax and this stopped me, like sitting down in an armchair and discovering there’s a bed of nails instead of a cushion under the flowered chintz. Uh-oh. Pat sighed again, this one a very long sigh, like a man about to step off a cliff. Then he shut his eyes, took a deep breath, and held it. And held it. And held it. After about a minute he began to turn, well, blue, but I don’t mean human-holding-his-breath blue, I mean blue. Still holding his breath, he opened his eyes and looked at me: his eyes were blue too, although several degrees darker than his skin, and I mean all of his eyes: the whites as well. Although speaking of all of his eyes, as I watched, a third eye slowly blinked itself open from between his eyebrows. He was still holding his breath. His ears were becoming pointed. He held up one hand and spread the fingers. There were six of them. The knuckles were all very knobbly, and the hand itself was very large. Pat was normally no more than medium-sized. Theo gently lowered the front legs of his chair to the floor, drifted over to the office door, and locked it. He returned to his chair, put his feet against the edge of the desk, and rocked back on two legs again. Pat started breathing. â€Å"If I let it go any farther I’ll start popping my buttons. Pardon me.† He unfastened his belt buckle and the button on his waistband. â€Å"You’re a demon,† I said. â€Å"Only a quarter,† said Pat, â€Å"but it runs pretty strong in me.† His voice sounded funny, deeper and more hoarse. â€Å"My full brother couldn’t turn if he held his breath till he had a heart attack. Nice for him. Sorry about the locked door, but it takes a good half hour for the effects to wear off again.† It’s only really illegal to be a vampire, but people who too regularly call in sick the day after the moon is full somehow never get promoted beyond entry-level positions, and a demon that can’t pass is an automatic outcast. And miscegenation is definitely a crime. Since the laws about this are impractical to enforce, what happens is that if you have a baby you know can’t pass, you arrange to look as careworn and despondent as possible (which will be easy in the circumstances) and go wail at the Registry Office that no one had told you that great-granddad – or great-grandmother – had been or done or had, whatever, great-grand-something being safely dead, of course, and unavailable for prosecution. So the kid gets registered, and grows up to find out it can’t get a job in any industry considered â€Å"sensitive,† and if any of its immediate family had been on the fast track, they’re probably now off it. For life. Even if nobody e lse shows any signs of being anything but pure human. It’s probably worse, the partbloods that are fine till they hit adolescence, and suddenly find out that the Other blood, which they may not have known about, is alive and kicking and going to ruin their lives. Every now and then it happens to a grown-up. There was a famous case a few years ago about a thirty-eight-year-old bank manager who suddenly grew horns. They fired him. He’d had an exemplary career till that moment. He appealed. The case got a huge amount of publicity. They still fired him. As â€Å"sensitive† industries go, SOF was at the top. No way any demon partblood was going to get hired by the SOFs. Even someone like Mary might be turned down if she applied for basic SOF training, if anyone was so poor-spirited as to report to her recruitment team that the coffee she poured was always hot. Mary wasn’t registered. If the government insisted on registering everyone who could sew a seam that never unraveled or pour coffee that stayed hot or patch a bicycle tire that didn’t pop somewhere else a hundred feet down the road, they’d have to register sixty percent or something of the population, and fond as the government was of paper trails and tax levies, apparently this boggled even their tiny minds. But SOF cared down to this level. The deep widow’s peaks you sometimes get with a little peri blood and which are so fashionable that models and actors are forever having cosmetic surgery to implant them, if one of these people had a sudden desire for a midlife career change to SOF they’d have to go in with their surgeon’s certificate taped to the ir forehead, or they’d be turned away at the door. SOF didn’t fool around. Pat blinked his blue eyes at me and smiled. He had a nice smile as a demon. His teeth were blue too. â€Å"SOF is rotten with partbloods,† said Jesse. â€Å"I’m one. Theo’s another. So is John. So are Kate and Millicent and Mike. We somehow seem to find each other to partner with. Safer, of course. ‘Hey, doesn’t that blue guy look a lot like Pat? Where is Pat, anyway?’ ‘Look like Pat? You must be joking. He’s at home with a head cold anyway.’ But Pat’s the most spectacular of us, which is why we called him in tonight.† I had maybe about managed to keep my jaw from dropping round my ankles while Pat turned blue – it had taken several minutes, I could go with the flow – but this was absolutely one too many. This was on a par with, say, finding out the president of the global council was a sucker, the moon was made of green cheese, and the sun only rose in the morning because of this complicated system of levers and dials overseen by an encampment of the master race from Antares settled on Mars†¦Ã¢â‚¬ What the hell d’you mean SOF is rotten with partbloods? What about the goddam blood test when they take you?† All three of them smiled. Slowly. For a moment I was the only human in the room, and they were all bigger and tougher than I was. I went very still. Not, I’m sorry to say, the stillness of serenity and compassion. Much more like a rabbit in headlights. The moment passed. â€Å"It must have been a bastard in the beginning,† said Jesse. â€Å"When the only drug that worked made you piss green for a week,† said Pat. â€Å"Or indigo or violet,† said Theo. â€Å"Yeah,† said Pat. â€Å"Depending on what kind of partblood you were.† â€Å"But the lab is pretty well infiltrated by now,† said Jesse. â€Å"Once you get that far you’re usually home already.† There was another pause. Maybe I was supposed to ask what â€Å"you’re home already† meant, but I didn’t want to know any more. I hadn’t been so mind-blasted since I woke up next to a bonfire surrounded by vampires. As the silence lengthened I realized that the tension level was rising again, and there were more meaningful looks flashing back and forth. I tried to rouse myself. But I was so tired. At last Pat spoke. â€Å"Okay,† he said. â€Å"Where we were. Um. We’ve been thinking for a while that something like†¦turning blue must have happened to you out at the lake. Or – wherever. But we haven’t had a good excuse to, well, ask you about it closely. Somewhere we could lock the door when I held my breath.† â€Å"Till tonight we haven’t been totally sure that’s what we were looking at anyway,† said Jesse. â€Å"Arguably we still aren’t.† They looked at me hopefully. How to cite Sunshine Chapter 7, Essay examples

Tuesday, April 28, 2020

The Meaning of a Devolved Government free essay sample

With respect to specifically patial planning, the Ministry of Lands and Settlements, through the Department of Physical Planning has been on the task. However, In the devolved government framework, In the countles there will be officers In charge of planning cities, municipalities and towns. At the cities and municipalities, there will boards some of whose works will be to: a. formulate and Implement Integrated development plans; b. Control land use, land sub-dlvlslon, land development and zoning by public and private sectors for any purpose, Including Industry, commerce, markets, shopping nd other employment centres, residential areas, recreational areas, parks, entertainment, passenger transport, agriculture, and freight and transit stations within the framework of 1 the spatial and master plans for the city or munlclpallty as may be delegated by the county government The approval of all plans and pollcles will be done by the County Assembly while county Executive committees, will De responslDle Tor tne Implementatlon 0T pollcles approved by the County Assembly. We will write a custom essay sample on The Meaning of a Devolved Government or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Moreover, in each county, there will be a epartment of planning to undertake the technical functions related to planning. Sub-national governance Once the devolved government system shall have been operationalized, the sovereign power of Kenyans will be exercised both at national and county level, not like it has been since independence where central governance has dominated. The powers of the National Executive will be exercised by the Cabinet, which will comprise of the President, the Deputy President, the Attorney General and Cabinet Secretaries. The Cabinet will supervise the national government line ministries and epartments. The National Assembly will enact legislation and exercise oversight over national revenue and expenditure. However, approval of Bills relating to the counties and oversight of county budgets has to be done Jointly with the Senate. The county as a level of governance will have both an executive and legislature arms. Each County Executive Committee will comprise of the County Governor, the Deputy County Governor and other members, not exceeding ten, appointed by the County Governor, with the approval of the County Assembly. The County Executive Committees will be headed by the County Governor assisted by the Deputy County Governor. The County Assembly, the legislative arm of the county government, will consist of ward representatives and other members nominated by political parties in proportions that will ensure gender balance and representation of marginalized groups. The County Assembly will be headed by a Speaker, elected by the County Assembly from among persons who are not members of the County Assembly. The functions of the County Assembly include: a) approval of plans and policies and nacting laws that are necessary for the governance of the counties, b) exercise oversight over the County Executive Committee, and c) ensuring that the interests of the voters are well represented in the County Government. The County Executive Committees, on the other hand, will be responsible for the implementation of policies and laws approved by the County Assembly, as well as the management and coordination of the county administration and departments. The county 2 administration and departments will be in-charge of the day-to-day operations of he County Government, and will be supervised by the County Executive Committees.